Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the pathology of perception show “objctive” and “subjective” events have sense for the living body only in relation to its whole equilibrium, that is, to how it organises itself overall and how it thus “meets” those events. If we apply this conception to Husserl’s example of two mutually-touching hands of one body we must then state not that we perceive here a coincidence of certain subjective sensations with certain objective qualities, but rather that my body, in the sense of an object, results from a restructuralisation of the whole field of the body accomplished by the body as the performer of perceptual intentions. The body-object, and for the same reasons also the body-subject, is therefore the product of the analysis of the body in the sense of a field of structuralisation or polarisation, not its original phenomenological “stratum”, as in Husserl. If the body grasps itself as perceptible only by a change of its own structure, inasmuch as it is a certain field of structuralisation, then an “external” thing, which is likewise a pole of such grasping, must belong to the same ontological “field” as the body. Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh”, that is the circularity between questioning of perception and answering of the perceived, is thus a phenomenon taking place beyond the boundary of the body as a singular being. This fact allows the concept of flesh to be extended and to be understood as an “element”, that is, as a dimension in which individual beings only appear
This article engages critically with the theory of expression proposed by Mitchell S. Green in his Self-Expression (2007). In this book, Green argues that expressions are signals designed to convey information about mental states. By putting pressure on one of the examples Green uses in his book, I will challenge this thesis. I will then deepen this challenge by developing a contrast between two philosophical perspectives on expression, which I name the 'instrumental' and the 'descriptive'. I take Green’s theory of expression to be an exemplar of the instrumental perspective. Expression, in the instrumental perspective, is a means for transmitting information about mental states from organism to organism. The descriptive perspective I articulate with the help of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On the descriptive view, expression is (at least a part of) an answer to the question what it is so much as to have mental states and a living body. I suggest at the end of the article that if we remain within the instrumental perspective, we will not be able to use expression to satisfactorily answer this question.
In this paper, I argue that activities as crossing the road, riding a bike or going through a door involve body representations with non-conceptual mental content. Firstly, I discuss some key objections to the notion of body representations for action, in order to draw out their main consequences. Then I introduce an approach to the content of body representations involved in the guidance of everyday action, which seems to satisfy crucial demands in exchange for moving away from conceptual views on mental content. I conclude by discussing a potential objection to that proposal and presenting some thoughts on the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual content in this field.